2002 Mercury Cougar - The Fastest 4.6L On Earth

Once upon a time, some goon found an open road, deftly balanced the delicate grip/throttle threshold from a standstill, then decided to lift at 60 mph and call it a day. Sounds like a job half done, but since then the world has mysteriously embraced 0-60 as the international yardstick of acceleration testing. We don't know how quickly John Mihovetz's Accufab Cougar hits 60 mph, and frankly, we don't care. But to put things into perspective for enthusiasts and "consumers" alike, in the 6.83 seconds that many consider a respectable 0-60 time, his Merc has traversed a quarter-mile, clicked the traps at 205 mph, and earned the title of the World's Fastest Modular-Powered Car in the process.

With the overwhelming popularity and mammoth aftermarket support of the 5.0L Ford small-block, the current mod-motors get no love. Marginal power gains from not-so-marginally-priced bolt-ons don't help matters either. Many late-model Blue Oval racers either yank their overhead-cam motors in favor of the venerable 302, or simply stick with older Fox-bodies. However, the Accufab Cougar is no ordinary door-slammer, but rather a purpose-built tube-chassis drag car that was originally designed to run in the Pro Import class of NHRA's Summit Sport Compact Series in 2002, where domestic V-8s were allowed to participate if they had overhead cams. Enter Ford's twin-cam mod-motor. And the body had to be "of import manufacture, or a domestic-labeled, joint-manufactured platform," and the engine make had to match the body make. Hence the Cougar body (a commingling of Mazda and Mercury) wrapped around a Pro Stock-style tube chassis.

Short-blocked by the experts at Sean Hyland Motorsport, the world's quickest modular Ford started life in a '96 Mustang Cobra. It was bored 0.020-over while retaining the stock sleeves, then fitted with 10.0:1-compression forged flattop pistons, Manley billet-steel rods, and a stock crank. The rest of the combo is all Mihovetz's custom trickery built in-house at Accufab. Fitted with four 38/31mm (I/E) valves per cylinder, the Accufab-rubbed heads flow a peak 330 cfm at 28 inches of water. With a robust foundation in place, twin Precision Turbo & Engine 74mm GTS turbos hanging off Mihovetz-bent headers huff into custom discharge piping, a massive air-to-water intercooler, a handbuilt intake manifold, and an off-the-shelf Accufab 90mm throttle-body. When you put 1,200 hp to the ground-more than most chassis dynos can handle-you know you've built a pretty stout combo. When you make that kind of power with a stock crank and block, then keep it together for 50 passes between rebuilds (as opposed to eight for a typical Pro Stock motor), you know it's not a fluke. When you use that power to propel a 2,300-pound chassis to 6.83 seconds at 205 mph, you know you're a hero.

Squeezing all that air into just 284 cubes requires an equally monster fuel system to match. A 200-gph Weldon pump sucks fuel from a 3-gallon cell then feeds custom Accufab rails and Siemens 83-lb/hr injectors. The squirters may seem a bit small for such a brutal application, but the Paxton regulator pressurizes the fuel system at a staggering 85 psi. While that puts the burden on the standalone Electromotive TEC2 box and the guy fiddling with the laptop, it all works out in the end. With the crank trigger shooting high-voltage spark to the Magnecor wires and Denso plugs, the Cougar takes no longer to fire up than a typical high-compression big-block and settles on a surprisingly smooth cadence at idle-at least by drag-car standards. Make no mistake, the burble still thumps you in the chest, but without the violence you might expect from a car of this caliber.

Roughly five times the power of a stock DOHC 4.6L dumping mercilessly at 7,600 rpm through an air-shifted Lenco CS3 five-speed may hint at the use of some exotic traction device, but that isn't the case. "Just big-ass tires," says Mihovetz-along with a four-link. And big they are, the Mickey Thompsons measuring 33.5x17-16. Just in case the Crower clutch and flywheel decide to go poof, a Trick Titanium bellhousing helps keep the digit-count at 20. Out back lives a Mark Williams 9-inch rearend stuffed with 40-spline axles, a spool, and 4.30:1 gears that connect to a 4-inch-diameter Inland Empire driveshaft that we really feel sorry for. This bad boy hooks hard, as evidenced by pants-wetting, wheelie-bar-scraping 1.07-second 60-foot times. A few 9,000-rpm shifts and 205 mph later, twin air-launched Stroud chutes and 10-inch front-and-rear Lamb disc brakes throw down the reins.

Assembling an exhibition car to showcase your parts business-and having loads of fun in the process-isn't anything new. However, a car that runs this hard and this deep into the single digits with an atypical powerplant fabricated and tuned entirely in-house (save for the short-block and body panels) isn't exactly common. Also unorthodox in a good way: splashes of shiny eye candy on the intake manifold, cam covers, radiator, wheels, and hot and cold portions of the turbo plumbing. Unfortunately, due to small fields of competitors and 2002-series-champ Matt Scranton's 10-wins-at-10-events domination, the Pro Import class Mihovetz built the car for got axed. Not to be dismayed, he currently campaigns the Cougar in Fun Ford Weekend's Pro 5.0 class and now in NHRA Comp Eliminator BB/AT, where he qualified No. 1 way under the index at Pomona last November. In the meantime, he'll have to find solace in the fact that he built the first mod-motor car to hit 200 mph and run in the 6s. And no, we're not talking about 0-60. Now all it needs is a passenger seat and a box of Huggies for a ride-along.